Field of the Art
The disclosure relates to the field of systems interactivity, and more particularly to the field enabling fixed-layout content to receive input and communication with interactive systems.
Discussion of the State of the Art
Content (text, graphics, photos, images, and/or any combination of these) may be developed in a wide variety of content or general authoring applications at present. This content can then be printed or exported out to a variety of formats depending on the feature/functions of the original source content or authoring user application. This content, which is already authored and available may be required, specifically in business environments, to be re-used in other application software systems or servers comprising database(s), file storage systems, workflow and other logic operations. Various methods may be available to export out this content from these authoring applications so that it can be re-used in some way for these other purposes. The content export approach from these source/authoring applications may be dependent on the available functions within these source application which create, and is often typically via an option (a) comprising all the elements at their lowest level (text, graphics, photos, images, etc.) or via an option (b) comprising an overall graphic image (i.e. snapshot) which preserves the original content layout exactly as it would be presented visually to an end user in an associated original source application, via some combination of Option (a) and (b), or via some other processes. If option (a) is available, it may require additional manual efforts to extract and then condition and clean the content so that it is re-useable in the mentioned systems, whereby these manual efforts will result in additional time and associated cost. If option (b) is used, this will result in fixed-layout content image(s) being exported, and if the user then wishes to extract out some or all of the elements (text, graphics, photos, images, etc.), they may need further additional content extraction tools, e.g. optical character recognition (OCR), combined with a plurality of manual efforts to extract and clean the elements for re-use, which results in incurring significantly more time and cost as compared to option (a). Any further combinations of options (a) and (b), or other derivative methods, will also all drive additional time effort and cost to complete. Manual time effort and cost problem can become a very large problem if the volume of content is high. It is typical for business enterprises to have tens of thousands, if not millions, of pages of content where there is a pressing requirement to re-use this content in application software and server systems with databases, file systems, workflow management systems, and/or other logic systems as outlined previously, which amplifies the problem. Typically replacing this content into an interactive form requires an unreasonable amount of time and cost, and in some cases, there are mandatory requirements to exactly preserve the original content layout precisely (i.e. precise fixed-layout content). Accordingly, many business enterprises choose option (b) described above, incurring additional time and huge costs to complete. Fixed-layout content is defined as being a precise and accurate (for example, pixel by pixel, or using an alternative unit of measure) representing the original source authored content.
All of the above methods are focused on exporting or extracting and or conditioning content for further re-use, and combining this with logic to arrive at new systems and server applications, and to deliver new user experiences for the end user. Accordingly, content extraction, conditioning, and re-use methods, known in the art, incur time and cost to complete. Further, some options outlined above provide less flexibility for content re-use than others in the creation of new application processes and systems and servers.
What is needed are systems and methods to easily extract and combine extracted content with programmatic elements to programmatic systems and servers in a way that: (a) significantly reduces time (including manual additional processes) and associated cost for extraction and conditioning of content; (b) allows for original source content to be combined easily with programmatic element systems and servers; (c) allows separated control and behavior of the extracted content compared to programmatic elements; (d) allows for easy association of programmatic elements to extracted content; and, (e) supports size scaling of extracted content such that all associated programmatic elements automatically and dynamically re-size/re-scale relative to other programmatic elements within the extracted content while acting independently of programmatic system and servers.